Do Researchers Practice What They Preach? Unjustified Causal Language in Psychological Scientists' Descriptions of Their Work

Abstract

People are biased toward seeing associations between independent events and assuming causal explanations for those associations. Indeed, the lay public incorrectly infers cause-and-effect from descriptions of non-experimental research as often as they correctly infer cause-and-effect from descriptions of experimental research. We suspect that these warning calls to educational and counseling psychologists are indicative of the state of research in the social sciences more generally, and we hypothesize that unjustified causal language occurs in empirical, peer-reviewed journal articles in psychology.